Don 2’s German co-producer Film Base Berlin is teaming up with Patrick Cassavetti of Canada’s Shaftesbury Films to produce Paul Black’s second feature The Same Eyes.

Speaking exclusively to Screen Daily, Film Base Berlin’s Mathias Schwerbrock said that the production is being set up for an October shoot in Toronto and Berlin. “We will be in Cannes to line up financing and hope to confirm casting,” he said.

The screenplay by UK-born Black, who emigrated as a child to Canada and is now living and working in Berlin, centres on a man’s search for his identity as he tries to discover who he was in his previous incarnation.

“The film is between arthouse and mainstream,” Schwerbrock continued, explaining that Black put him into contact with Cassavetti in Toronto. The veteran UK producer’s credits include Mona Lisa, Emma, Intimacy and films by Terry Gilliam such as Brazil and Fear And Loathing in Las Vegas.

Black made his feature debut in the US with the award-winning 2004 America Brown, starring Ryan Kwanten, Hill Harper, Natasha Lyonne, Eldoie Bouchez, Michael Rapaport and Karen Black, after a prize-winning short Please! with Gerald Butler in 2001

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Meanwhile, 2013 should see Schwerbrock partner with Russian producer Kira Saksaganskaya of St Petersburg-based Rock Films on Alexey Uchitel’s next feature project The Stockholm Syndrome.

“I have always liked Uchitel’s films and had been talking to him for the past two years about directing this story of a woman who is abducted and held for 18 years,” Schwerbrock said.

The project has received development funding from Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg and was one of the first films to get support from the German-Russian Co-Development Fund earlier this year.